Matt Lanza

It's like they found evidence in South America that I think in the Amazon, there's a lot of fertile land and a lot of it ends up like almost being seeded by the dust that comes off of Africa to help make it more fertile.

Yeah, it's so cool.

But what it also does is it inhibits hurricanes because hurricanes need moisture.

They need moisture and dry air is dust.

Dust comes from the desert, desert's dry, that's dry air.

Hurricanes don't like that.

So that explains a lot why the first part of hurricane season is usually typically quiet because we're often seeing all this dust come off Africa and basically limit the development of storms.

So that's a really cool feature.

So as we get into August and September and things start to ramp up, you get these thunderstorm complexes that start to form in Africa and they move all the way across the continent in a similar vein, kind of what we see in Central America during this time of year, parts of South America where you get, you know, thunderstorms blow up during daytime heating.

You know, you can almost time your clock to having thunderstorms and they move through and that's that.

Like, how do you feel about them?

Yeah, no, no, no.

But they're all hitting on a very, very important topic.

We know hurricanes are complicated.

They're more than just wind.

You know, it's wind, it's surge, it's rain, it's tornadoes, you know, it's all these different things.

And

The Saffir-Simpson scale, which is the scale that we use to rate hurricanes one to five, based on their wind speed, is like you said, it's wind only.

That's the only thing that goes into it.

You could have a storm that's a little itty-bitty hurricane, and you have 160 mile an hour winds, and it's going to impact a small patch of land.